A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [28]
PART I:
THE NARRATIVE QUESTION
6
The Biblical Narrative in Three Dimensions
Throughout my quest for a new kind of Christianity, I’ve had what seems to me (some won’t agree!) an accidental advantage working for me: I wasn’t formally trained in theology. Now, I love theology, and I read it constantly and with great pleasure (unlike many of my seminary-trained friends, who seem to have exceeded their saturation point while in school). My background was in the liberal arts, especially in the study of English language and literature. My training taught me to read for scenes and plots, not doctrines; for protagonists and antagonists, not absolute and objective truths; for character development and conflict resolution, not raw material to be processed into a system of beliefs; for resonances and common patterns among many texts and traditions, not merely for uniqueness or superiority of one text or tradition; for multiple layers of interpretation, not merely one sanctioned one. When I was in graduate school, the practice of “deconstruction” was in its ascendancy, providing me yet another advantage as I have pursued this quest. Deconstruction is not destruction, as many erroneously assume, but rather careful and loving attention to the construction of ideas, beliefs, systems, values, and cultures.
When you approach the Bible literarily, aided by these kinds of advantages, the Genesis narrative sets the stage for what follows. As we’ve seen, it’s the story of a good creation marred by expanding human evil, countered by divine faithfulness, leading to profound reconciliation and healing. This narrative serves as a kind of fractal for the story as a whole and for its many parts. But Genesis is, in many ways, not the main story of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is more like a prequel to the prime or paradigmatic narrative: Episode 1 in relation to Star Wars, if you will, or The Hobbit in relation to The Lord of the Rings. That prime narrative comes to us in the book of Exodus. If Genesis is a story of sacred creation and reconciliation, Exodus is a story of sacred liberation and formation.
Exodus begins in pain. A new king has come to power in Egypt, and he has forgotten the good relationship Joseph had forged with his predecessor many generations earlier. Meanwhile, the Jewish people have proven very fertile. Their population explosion frightens the new king: the Jews might, if a war were to break out, side with Egypt’s enemies. So Pharaoh decides to crack down and reduce the Jews to slavery, using them to build Egyptian storage cities, so they will increase Egypt’s security rather than threaten it. The Egyptians, we are told, made the lives of the Jewish people “bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them” (1:14).
Anyone who has been oriented to the biblical story in the book of Genesis immediately hears bells ringing with the words “hard service,” “mortar and brick,” and “field.” In Genesis, hunter-gatherers (Adam and Eve) were ejected from their original garden. In their life as agriculturalists “east of Eden,” they would work the fields with hard labor. Then, when agriculturalists (like Cain) were driven from farm life to city life because of their violence, they eventually began building an empire (called Babel) of mortar and brick—exactly the kind of empire that in Genesis grieved God’s heart because it produced “only evil continually.”
So here again, human beings are toiling in the fields, lugging bricks and mortar, increasingly oppressed by an increasingly paranoid Egyptian despot. But the oppressed workers continue to “be fruitful and multiply” in spite of their oppression, so Pharaoh resorts to genocide, mandating first that the Jewish midwives kill all newborn boys, and then mandating that all Jews throw their newborn sons into the Nile. This dark command is nothing